Logistics

There's an old quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte that states "An army marches on its stomach." As he learned when warring against Russia in 1812 and the Germans when doing the same during World War II, an army needs more than weaponry and skilled generals to achieve victory. I promised a week ago to give some visual representations of just what the people of Israel looked like while in the desert. Here goes.

We're told that the people number 600,000. The Quad Cities metro area has around 300,000 people, so they were twice that size. How does a people like that march? Let's begin with a narrow parameter--imagine they're in a square formation and take up a total of four feet from front to back and side to side, or a total of 16 square feet. This isn't much, but if we do this, this is how much room they'd take up using a scale we should recognize:

It's a little fuzzy, but you can see the general point. These people would be crammed like sardines, but they'd fill a square with boundaries of Central Park, Marquette, almost to 35th St and almost to Harrison.

But the Bible tells us it was 600,000 MEN. Women and children weren't included, and at an extremely conservative count, I'll go with a total population of 2 million people. Using the same dimensions, this is how much room they would occupy:

Now we have a square with boundaries of Central Park, Marquette, 46th St. and almost to Eastern Ave. If you were to walk the perimeter, that would be about 6 miles or so. But I doubt they were arrayed in a square formation, and they had livestock and other items with them. I think it's much more reasonable to splay them out over 1,000 feet across and give them about 30 square feet of room each. If we do that for 2 million people, it looks like this:

1,000 feet would be approximately the width from our property line down on Marquette diagonally to the entrance off Central Park. The picture is fuzzy, but it stretches out about 11.5 miles, or just about to the Davenport Country Club in Pleasant Valley. With no communication except messengers, how does one communicate over an area this vast with a people this numerous. Obviously, with the help of God.

As we spend time with the Israelites, consider the sheer demands of a people that numerous and what a burden that had to be on Moses, and how lucky he was he didn't have to do it alone. We're just as lucky today.

Scott